Cloud on the horizon

The company then followed up with the Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) in 2008, and has since been joined by Google, Microsoft and others bringing it to the forefront of people’s imaginations.
The  popularity of virtualisation technology, whilst not cloud in itself, has allowed businesses to experiment with the creation of a shared infrastructure, making better use of fewer physical resources at the desktop, server, network and storage level.
   
Just ten years ago the technology, hardware and infrastructure simply wasn’t mature enough to take real advantage of the cloud as a solution. Storage has traditionally been the one area in particular where the technology to enable cloud has lagged behind, essentially because of the inability to deliver shared resources based on application requirements without impacting other applications. The good news is that these limitations are now being addressed.

Essentially, the cloud can be seen to be a dispersed network of computing and storage resources, dynamically applied to the applications they support with the means to automatically manage this structure by delivering it over a network to users (whether they be people or machines).
It can also be an agile, dynamic collection of dispersed resources that adapts to applications and workloads on a real-time basis to maximise responsiveness, resilience, flexibility, and efficiency. Due to the dynamic changing nature of business, cloud infrastructure needs to be able to react quickly to changing business priority by offering the ability to dynamically change service levels. This is particularly important at the storage layer.
Private & public clouds
Organisations have two main options and the first is a private cloud which is where an internal IT department provides cloud based functionality to its employees and customers only. The second, a public cloud, is the act of outsourcing cloud functionality from a service provider. Cloud service providers create the abstraction of physical infrastructure from the virtual environment and present a view of the environment to the user, based on their service level agreement with the provider.
 
The IT cloud removes the need for both hardware and software and introduces a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach to functions such as storage and processing. It does not mean however that there are no longer any datacentres, which some definitions may have you believe. Data is stored and servers are still housed.  There is a fundamental difference between “I don’t know how it is running” and “I can’t see it, so it doesn’t exist.”